Replacing Religion.

Today has been a bad day in so many ways. It seems I must have offended the gods today, so multifarious have been the misfortunes, and I’m led to wonder whether it all stemmed from a thought I had this morning. It wasn’t an entirely new thought, but it seemed to crystallise more than usual. At the risk of offending the gods further, I’ll spell it out.

It seemed to me that there is a pressing need for the human race to divest itself of religion. All religions are effectively speculative, and they do so lend themselves to a fractured mess of traditions and sects and traditions within sects. In consequence, they are one of the most potently divisive influences on the human race. They produce conflict; and conflict produces a host of evils including abuse, cruelty, power mania, enslavement, the letting of blood and the taking of lives. The situation in Afghanistan is the latest sad example, but it’s been going on for thousands of years.

I know I’m not the first person to say this, but I’ve noticed that most proponents of the idea are engaged in promoting atheism. I’m not. It’s apparent that we in the ‘developed’ world have largely consigned religion to a peripheral accessory, but what we’ve replaced it with won’t do. The new quasi religion has only brought us more insubstantial, less mysterious, more readily accessible gods like money, status, the promotion of ego, and lifestyle obsession. It’s all too plastic, too superficial; it struts its stuff loudly in the empty environs of the lower mind, but totally fails to recognise and nurture the inner being.

So while I advocate the dismissal of religion, I feel that we need to replace it with a more universal and inclusive form of spirituality, beginning with an acknowledgement of our connectedness to nature, and then proceeding to an individual search for the meaning of life and the nature of what lies beyond material existence.

Many people are now doing this – me included – but the movement is shackled by the religious zealots who are working hard to keep the human race bound in the chains of one tradition or another. ‘You must do as we say,’ they intone gravely. ‘We are right and everyone else is wrong. If you stray from our path you will eventually go to our version of God and be punished horribly. We might even hasten the process by dispatching your physical body.’

And so, while I have the deepest, most heartfelt sympathy for the poor people of Afghanistan, I suggest that the bigger picture – the real war, if you like – is with the religions which promote the divisions for dark-hearted people to use to their advantage. It’s a sad aspect of human nature that people will always seek reasons to come into conflict, but remove religion and a major window of opportunity will be closed.